by Thomas Wood
I clutched the suitcase tightly as he began to start the motor up. The suitcase that held so many secrets. The one that held so many potential answers for me, was now in my possession.
21
As the engine roared into life, the comforting rumbles of its pistons began to soothe me almost, as the amount of tracer rounds and crackles that zipped through the night sky seemed to intensify, to the point where it seemed that all the oxygen would simply be replaced by bullets.
I wanted desperately to open the suitcase and begin rummaging around in it, reading everything I could and trying to piece together what was going on. But I knew that now was not the right time to be doing that, I would need to focus for a few minutes more and hopefully, we would have the airfield far behind us before too long.
He caught me looking at the suitcase wistfully, “Do not open that! Don’t! We need to get out of here first!”
His English was impeccable, in fact it was better than how some native Englishmen spoke the language, which didn’t calm me in any way, in fact it served only as the spark to set off an eruption of emotions and paranoia-fuelled thoughts in my weary mind.
I began to question how he had known my name and whether or not he was known to the British military in some capacity. Maybe he had worked for them and had become a double agent, working for the Germans whilst pretending to work for the British. It would tally with why the Brits wanted him dead.
My flittering mind even reasoned that it was possible that he knew Jimmy personally, that he knew Joseph intimately and that they had all studied at the same university in England before the war, and that now they found their countries locked in bitter fighting they wanted to help the moral force to win.
But then again, maybe they were all helping one another, maybe it wasn’t a case of good against evil but friend against friend. I began searching myself for evidence in my recollections of Jimmy and whether it was at all possible that he had been feeding information to the Germans for the sake of his friendship with this man? But then again, if he had been talking to him with intelligence, if they had been friends, then surely, he wouldn’t have wanted the man dead? And if they had been friends then surely this man would have tried to save his bacon with something a bit more substantial than resting all his hopes on whatever was in the suitcase. Besides, all I had seen in the suitcase was a couple of spare pairs of underpants, some socks and his cherished photo of his family. There had been no sign of any paperwork or photographs that could lead to some sort of incrimination of anyone.
My mind was all over the place as a grenade kicked off over to our left as the Standartenführer engaged reverse gear and we began to whine our way across the field. I tried to start thinking about what was ahead of us, whether I would simply have to execute him at the side of the road or demand the intelligence that he claimed to have had. As the rounds intensified, and one or two began striking the car, I wondered whether I had a future to ponder at all.
The car crunched into first gear, and my head shot backwards as the spinning wheels finally gained the traction they needed, and we started to barrel towards the main gate. I had hoped that the fact that we were driving in a German staff car would mean that we would be relatively safe from all the cross firing, but I was very much mistaken. In fact, the moving vehicle became a target for both sides; the British judging that some sort of VIP was in there and needed taking out, the Germans believing that some of the attacking forces were making a break for it.
There was no point in winding the window down and trying to get some rounds down, the car was juddering all over the place and I simply wouldn’t have had a stable enough firing platform to really direct any rounds anywhere. The chances were that they would just be sent off into the night sky, causing no harm to anyone and serving only as an even bigger chance of me letting my chest become home to a thousand bullets.
I slid down in my seat, clutching the suitcase as if it was some sort of chainmail, a body armour that would prevent a fatal round from striking me down. The rounds increased even more as we crunched into a higher gear, the dang dang dang of bullets striking metal growing louder and louder the closer to the gate that we got.
I could see nothing from where I was cowering other than the tracer rounds that zipped across the bonnet of the car, aiming just ahead of us in the hope that we would drive straight into their rounds.
“Hold on!” He roared, holding onto the last syllable as I felt his foot push down so hard into the accelerator that I thought it would shoot through the floor.
We lunged forwards, both now screaming at the top of our lungs and an almighty crash threatened to burst my ear drums as we crunched our way through the security barrier. The barrier came clean off its hinges, but not before it had shattered the windscreen of the car beyond reasonable use. The Standartenführer’s head began bobbing around as he negotiated the spider’s web of smashed glass, trying to find a slither that was still intact that he could see through.
The rounds behind us suddenly seemed to die down, as if they had all given up on us and resorted to trying to kill each other once more. I felt a few rounds trying to hit us from behind and I risked sitting up again and taking a quick glance backwards, still clutching the suitcase as if my life depended on it.
The horizon was alive with orange glows of fire and the red-hot tracers that still zipped through the darkness. I could see no figures now, just the occasional flash of light and I said a quick prayer for the remaining Brits that were inside, and for Ray’s soul that was now in flight. Just as I did so, the whole airfield seemed to light up, the deep booming growl of the anti-aircraft gun beginning to purr through the night and throb through my chest. I breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t being used to fire upon us in the speeding car, but hoped desperately that it was the Brits who had managed to swing the gun into action first. Whoever was using it, would be the victors within a matter of seconds.
A flash of light filled my vision, sending me squirming back down to the pits of my chair, just as the rear windscreen disintegrated into a million tiny shards of glass, spraying themselves finely all over the back seat of the car.
“Phew!” I exhaled involuntarily, and I tried to calm myself down desperately, by trying to breathe in the considerably cleaner air than that of burning fuel and smouldering fighter planes.
It was then that I finally began to take stock of my situation, trying to plan ahead for what we would have to do to get out of the whole escapade alive.
I pulled my pistol up and immediately pressed it into the temple at the side of his head, which seemed to bulge as he realised what was going on. The car swerved momentarily, as if it had a mind of its own, before it was corrected and carried on, on its journey down the country road.
“I’m the one in charge here. Do not forget that. I will kill you if I have to.”
“I know, I know. I saw you kill one of your own men for this information, remember.” I suddenly felt sick to the pit of my stomach. I had killed one of my own. I had murdered him in my own selfish desire to find out why I had been compromised during my escape attempt and, more importantly, to find out what had happened to Cécile.
There was a family, somewhere in Britain, that would now get a telegram delivered to them, similar to the one that my own parents had received, informing them that their son, their brother, their best friend was dead. There would be no explanation as to how he had died, but just that he had, and it had all been at the hand of my weapon, at the hand of my murderous trigger finger.
I blinked profusely as I fought back the tears, the sudden realisation that I was no longer a solider, I was no longer even an assassin, fighting on the side of the moral, but I was a cold-blooded murderer, and I hadn’t even given any of it a second thought.
Even then, as I gave it more and more consideration, there was one thing that was niggling away at me, eating away at my very soul. I had no regrets over the incident. I would do it all again if the situation arose.
I bl
amed the German for making me feel this way, so I pressed the pistol into the side of his head just that little bit more, to make him aware that I was still there, that I still meant business.
“Nothing funny. If you try and get me set up I will paint this car with a nice colour of brain matter.”
We drove on for a few more minutes before I began to recognise certain aspects of the terrain.
“Stop the car. Get out, from here, we walk.”
He did exactly as he was told, walking in close behind me as we stepped over branches and brambles as we went deeper into the forest. He took possession of his prized suitcase and acted almost shocked when I uncovered my bag from under the ferns.
His shock soon turned to an admiration for the way that we had planned, the way that it hadn’t merely been a burst in to the airfield and straight out again.
“You came prepared. You knew it would end up like this.”
“To be honest, I didn’t actually think I would see this bag again,” I said, lifting it up onto my shoulders, with a slight chuckle.
For the first time, he smiled, a tired one, but a smile that made him seem almost human to me for a while, something that for some reason I tried to expel from my mind.
“Right,” I said, turning the pistol back on him, “back that way, we’ve got some walking to do.”
We walked for an hour, maybe more, our footsteps crunching on the hard, frozen ground that bullied my joints into an aching mess of pain and tiredness. As we got to the edge of the forest, I stopped him.
“Stay there. I’m getting out of these.”
“A very wise idea, my friend.”
I pulled the khaki from my body, exposing it to the freezing chill that suddenly picked up as soon as I undressed, and began pulling on the civilian clothes that I had lived in for the few weeks prior. I figured that it would work far better if I was in civvies and he was the one in uniform and not the other way around, in the hope that his embellished and overextravagant uniform would give us a free pass to almost anywhere in the country.
I finished changing and buried my khaki superficially in amongst all the brambles and thorns of the frozen forest floor, hoping that it would take the Germans days to find any evidence that I had even existed.
I pulled the pistol from my trousers, pointing it at his skull for one last time. He did not flinch this time, but instead looked at me knowing that I wasn’t about to pull the trigger, growing tired with the man who kept threatening death but never going through with it.
“I want the information now, how do I know that you’re not just leading me into a trap. How do I know that what you have is genuine?”
He looked at me with a smirk, “Of course it is genuine. How else would I know your name? How else would I have known that you were with a woman in the Hotel La Romaine in Paris? I am sorry. You are not going to kill me. I will not give you the information that I have until we are on British soil. You will have to get me there.”
I weighed up my options for a moment or two. He still had the suitcase, but it was an unworthy risk to gamble what he had in that case with what he also had stored up in his mind. A man like that wouldn’t have kept top secret files on traitors and double agents in the bottom of a suitcase. I knew it would all be in his mind and if I was to blow his mind all over the trees, there would be no way of piecing it all back together in an attempt to read it.
I had no option but to trust him, like he had no other choice but to put all his faith in me and my ability to try and get back to Britain.
22
I decided that we were far enough away from all of the drama to be able to stop and rest for an hour or two. The airfield would be a battle zone for an hour and then the clean-up operation would begin; that airfield needed to be operational within a matter of days if possible. The men that had survived the shootout wouldn’t have had time to organise some sort of search party, to try and find the soldiers that had raided them, and I hoped that they wouldn’t have the presence of mind to send out a search party for the missing German officer either.
I began to worry about the men that I had left behind and wonder whether they had all got out or not, excluding Ray of course. If, for any reason they had gone in and seen Ray’s body, I wondered if they would suspect me at all, or if they would assume it had just been an unfortunate event that he had been done over by the German officer.
Despite the appearance to the German of how I valued my men, I was genuinely concerned for their welfare and had wanted them to get out. If the others had somehow managed to escape, I wondered what they would have done and where they would go from here.
I was meant to be the one who helped them get back to Britain, it was me who was supposed to put them in contact with men like Joseph and help them to safety. With me gone, they were left completely to their own devices, to start from scratch.
I debated with myself as to how long they would actually survive, or whether they had gone into the bag already. No matter what had happened to them, I told myself that I was still alive, I was unhurt and for now, that was all that really mattered to me.
They could have still been waiting for me in the woods, where we had originally buried all of our kit, hoping that their escape officer would appear from behind the trees at any moment, broad grin on his face as he began to work out a plan to get them home. But he was long gone, helping a German officer escape to Britain where he would apparently spill all of his secrets. I wondered if they knew that they had been double crossed, I wondered if they had known that my intentions and objectives were not the same as theirs.
Again, I found myself battling with my conscience; I had betrayed them, I had been promised to them, to help them as soon as the mission was over but instead, I had sacrificed them. My selfish motivations began to take a grip on my mind again as I thought about what lay ahead for me.
If they had somehow found out that I was working for military intelligence, and I had been sent there to carry out an assassination, and especially the fact that I had helped a German get out of the airfield alive, then they would be baying for my blood.
If it was me, I would immediately be taking the logical steps to tracking the man down and to stop him dead in his tracks. I would want to put a bullet in myself, if I was one of those men.
I tried to calm myself down as I rested my head against the tree trunk to get some sleep. I didn’t know if I could trust the German to stay alongside me and keep watch, or whether he had simply pre-arranged it all that this would be the place where I would be arrested but, in that moment of time, I didn’t much care for my own welfare at all.
I had betrayed all of the loyal soldiers who had been with me, the ones that would willingly have taken a bullet for me if the situation had arisen, and I had murdered one of my own, now lying cold in the officer’s quarters of the airfield. I imagined that his body would be cleared up last and even then, treated with little to no respect. I would have done the same if I had a body in my care representative of a group who had killed so many of my men, not to mention caused destruction on a biblical scale.
Each and every time I drifted off to sleep, I would wake with a start, imagining that I had been followed this whole time, that it was some sort of test from Jimmy to see if I could hold my resolve and fulfil my objectives, despite what my target might be saying to me. If he was watching he knew that I would have failed immensely.
But I knew that this wasn’t a test, if anyone had in fact followed me, then I would be dead within a matter of minutes, particularly if it was a group of British soldiers who found me, ones that were pining for vengeance, vengeance which could only be obtained by killing me.
My paranoia grew to the point where it was no longer mental, it was physical, the itchiness and scratchiness of my skin serving to keep me awake and alert to everything and everyone that was around me.
The German swiftly fell asleep, and so I took it upon myself to stay up and keep watch, something that I struggled to do, despite the consta
nt itching of my crawling skin.
I saw Red in amongst all the trees, his great big grin and annoying permanent smile still beaming out at me as he sat in the divot of the ground, slapping the forest floor with such a vigour that it made it shake as if a mortar round had hit it. He carried on shouting at me, as he always did, “Come on Sir! Come on Alf, you’re nearly there! You’re nearly there!”
I crawled towards him and as I got closer I began to feel free, to feel jubilant. I would soon be going home, to see my parents, to see my brother, and eventually be with Cécile again. But it didn’t take long for the jubilations to cease, for the doubt to creep in, for the utter desolation to take hold.
The beaming figure of Red was gone by the time I got to his shell hole, it was just a mess of innards and blood, as if a farm animal had been gutted and its insides collected in one grotesque kind of bucket. The blood was infused with the dirt, the limbs buried in the earth. Red was gone, as he always was, his teeth gleaming out at me still from amongst the rubble.
Each time I saw him in my mind, the story would progress a little further. In reality, I had never made it to the shell hole. I didn’t want to see the bomb site. But in my mind, in my dreams, I kept on crawling, I continued to drag myself ever closer to Red’s final resting place.
It was the same with Cécile. She would appear to me time and time again, telling me it wasn’t my fault that she had been taken, but somehow it always rested on me heavier than the last time. I had been foolish. I had made mistakes. Mistakes which had led to her death.
I walked through a courtyard of stone buildings, where there was a figure laying asleep up against the far wall. I recognised her instantly each time, her blue and red concoction of her Red Cross uniform, still gleaming, acting as the only indicator I needed to identify her.
We would brush hands again, we would link arms, we would do all the things that we had ever done before that brought us closer together.
